Regex Analysis

General explanation

This function populates a target property with the groups captured from the regular expression analysis on the source property. The regular expression analysis is carried out basing on the regex-pattern and applying an output format to the extracted regular expression groups.

Information about regular expression groups can be found here.

Example

Let us assume that the source property represents a date of the format:

20081209

and that the target property needs a date in the format :

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS

We can use a regular expression like:

([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})

and an output format:

{1}-{2}-{3} 00:00:00

to achieve our goal.

In fact the result of the above example will result in:

2008-12-09 00:00:00

Explained

The regular expression used defines 3 groups, which are separated by the round brackets:

Regex Group	Explained	Caught part of 20081209
([0-9]{4})	catches 4 numbers between 0 and 9	2008
([0-9]{2})	catches 2 numbers between 0 and 9	12
([0-9]{2})	catches 2 numbers between 0 and 9	09

The output can then be formatted concatenating groups with any string.

The format {1}-{2}-{3} 00:00:00 simply defines that the first three groups will be concatenated by a dash and that a default time will be added at the end of the resulting string.